Introduction

Development processes

General workflow

The basic development process we follow is outlined in this diagram. So, in a nutshell:

All patches must be sent to "openvpn-devel" mailing list for review. The subject should preferably be prefixed with [PATCH]

All patches need to be reviewed and accepted (ACK) by at least one other developer to make sure they meet our quality criteria

All accepted patches go to the OpenVPN "testing" tree (Git) first

Code is moved to the OpenVPN "stable" tree (SVN) after initial testing

All official releases are based on the "stable" (SVN) tree and go through a feature freeze and a Beta/RC process

If someone maintains their modifications in a git tree already, those git trees can be pulled as long as it will not cause any conflicts against the master/SVN development branch. However, the author must send a pull request to the devel mailing list, including a description in plain English of the changes. This is so to open up for a public discussion of the changes, and to allow the ACK process to work. Changes in git trees needs to get ACKed as well, just like patches. Pull requests to the mailing list should preferably be prefixed with [GIT PULL].

NOTE: Patches or "git pull requests" sent directly to a development tree ("stable" or "testing") maintainer will be rejected. All patches and contents of git pull requests must be public and must be discussed in public.

Also note that the documentation (e.g. man pages) need to be updated, if

New functionality has been introduced

Old functionality has changed

Functionality has been removed

Coding conventions

This is work in progress, but will include things like

Code indenting

Scratch memory handling with "gc"

Code repositories

Old CVS repository

There is an old CVS repository hosted in SF.net. This is not used for any development.

Stable (SVN) repository

The OpenVPN project makes use of two code repositories. The Stable SVN repository is maintained by James Yonan and hosted at openvpn.net. Instructions for using it can be found here. Currently (Feb 2010) only James has write access to this repository, but anonymous read-only access is available.

Code from this repository should be used if stability is important for you, but the official releases are missing some essential piece of functionality.

Testing (Git) repository

The Testing repository is maintained by David Sommerseth and uses Git. This repository is hosted by SF.net under the OpenVPN project. The master branch in the git tree is based on the openvpn/branches/BETA21 SVN branch.

There are several branches in the Git tree, each of which tracks the different patches/contributions separately. There's also one branch that contains all the available patches:

This gives James a possibility to only include/merge in the features and bugfixes which he wants to include into his "stable" development branch.

It is expected that each contributor which have received a feature branch makes sure it merges cleanly against the development branch at any time. The same applies to maintainers of external development Git trees. Also, the development of the feature branch is the author's responsibility - "testing" tree maintainer only collects the patches and makes sure all features and bugfixes play nicely together to catch conflicts as early as possible (and of course do sanity review of all patches).

Generic instructions for using Git in SF.net can be found here. Generic usage instructions for OpenVPN project's Git repository can be found here. To fetch the latest development code, use

You will here get a openvpn-testing directory. When entering this directory, you will get the 'master' branch by default. To checkout the allmerged branch, use

git checkout -b allmerged origin/allmerged

To see all available branches, use

git branch -a

Use the code in the allmerged branch from this git tree if you want the latest and greatest features and you're willing to encounter problems. If you're unfamiliar with Git in general, take a look at these links: